Chrome seems like a nice browser and almost ready for prime time. It’s probably as stable as Safari was 6 months ago.
It’s not yet as pretty as Safari – the tabs interface in particular is not too well thought out. I often have 30-40 tabs open in Safari and it gets really weird with Chrome – every tab just gets a little smaller across the top of the window and really tough to see.
The other thing I miss is my flash blocking which with Safari works like a charm – flash doesn’t exist but you can easily click to watch a you tube video or some such – Chrome just has all the flash nastiness of the web all exposed.
I’m not ready to jump yet – I think Safari with process isolation would be just as good as chrome so I”m not sure what I’d be getting.
Trends are a massively destructive force. They’ve taken us from horrifically expensive computers stored in buildings to wasting compute cycles to animate the album covers on my iPhone. Disk drives the size of fridges with enough storage for 2 mp3s to the Terabyte disk I just bought off Amazon. Charles Lindbergh> being famous for crossing the Atlantic to weekends in New York to take advantage of the shopping (fair enough, the exchange rate has put paid to that but you get the idea).
All of these are possible because something scarce and valuable became common and cheap. It just took time. They destroyed one set of value (IBM making 1000% on those hard drives) and transferred it to everyone (my iPhone – the hard disk manufacturer has created a work of genius that they’re making 2% and will be obsolete in 6 months) There’s an obvious and interesting question about which things with value due to their scarcity and consumer pull will evolve in the same way.
We’ve seen the revolution in telecommunications and what it’s done to the carriers. We’re watching the newspaper people realise their day in the sun is done. What we’re not seeing is anything happen to the power companies (in fact energy seems likely to become more scarce and expensive bucking this trend entirely). Cars similarly have reached the point where they don’t seem to be getting better as vehicles, they just come with nicer toys inside. I love my Audi convertible but the latest Ford Focus is a fantastically good car and the mismatch in value vs. price is going to become more stark as we go forward.
Consumer electronics? All those companies that used to be nicely segmented all look the same today – Sony directly competes with Korean companies you’d never heard of 10 years ago on quality and price and neither of them seems to have any margin left to play with. I get a 42″ LCD screen for pocket change and the old electronics giants slowly fade.
Instapaper is totally blowing my mind. Finally something to replace my insane scheme of keeping 20-50 tabs open in Safari to make sure I catch up with web content that looks interesting. I’ve been using the free version for about 2 weeks and I’m just now downloading the Pro edition. This should be on your iPhone!
Cory Doctorow seems to have written a short essay I’ve been meaning to write for some time. In short, metadata sucks.
The semantic web, as embodied by Twine and the like seems like a nice idea at first. If only all that messy information on the web was nicely categorised then all would be well.
It’s a typical CS grad wet dream – taxonomies and hierarchies are what we grew up on. People are messy and computers are the tools we use to organise them.
Of course Yahoo tried this – we all remember how that nice hierarchy killed Altavista and Google right?
Cory’s first point is probably the key technical issue – people lie and even if they don’t they’re idiots. Web ratings have existed for years and might at one point have had the force of law behind them yet they’ve never worked properly and are essentially dead.
The other side of the coin is that semantic technologies are solving a problem that’s increasingly not a problem – my grandmother finds things on Google everyday – even Microsoft seems to have sorted out it’s search these days.
In short, semantic metadata is a great idea that will never usefully work.
Seth Godin asks if he’s the only one who’d pay for HiDefenition voice. Normally I love what Seth writes but in this case, the answer to the question is pretty much yes – virtually no-one wants to pay for good quality telephone calls.
Say what you will about the phone company but AT&T and BT have a wealth of understanding about how to make telephone calls sound good. The theory is well understood and any voice codec comes with a standardised score which will tell you in advance how good it will sound. Today BT will sell you a very high quality VoIP service – problem is no-one wants to pay for it. Consumers have voted with their wallets and they’ve said no.
I sit in meetings every month where very smart engineers talk about how to design the network to support great voice products, all the while taking calls on their mobile phones which sound like you’re talking from the bottom of a well. GSM defines high quality voice codecs for 3G – no mobile company has every succeeded in selling these.
There are many cases where people pay for quality but usually it’s because the standard offering is pretty awful. But though we remember lots of bad quality phone calls, most of the time it’s perfectly adequate. Voice just isn’t that bad today.
I listened to a great harvard podcast the other day about the social contract in relation to business. The concept was simple – in times past companies would look after you beyond simply paying you. In return you would be flexible about how you delivered value and more loyal than otherwise.
This wasn’t a job for life scenario. Companies allowed a myriad of small things which technically they shouldn’t: use of company phones and photocopiers fit personal business; a nod and a wink at the length if your lunch break; trust in your expens report.
What they got were people who took a little mire than they technically shoud, but never overtly stole. When crunch time came employees would work the extra hours and not complain. They’d answer their mobiles on a Saturday.
Now companies are cracking down on all these small niceties exactly when they are also asking employees to take haircut on raises and salary. It’s working because people need their jobs and the bottom line is always easy to bump by a few percent in a push.
But what happens in three years? Rosy scenario is we’re growing again: jobs are easy to find and money is available.
I predict employees will desert these ‘efficient’ companies at the drop of a hat. They’ve shown they dont care about you so why should you care about them?
So why shoud companies care? It’s all business anyway right?
They should care because the old way was a great deal. For fifty bucks a month on tax deductible sundries they got an extra ten hours a month out of execs and people willing to work Saturday. Now they’ve saved their six hundred dollars a year but productivity has dropped – people who went on a five thousand dollar course leave for a competitor – that’s eight years of savings down the drain and you need to find a new person and bring them up to speed.
The above video is Geoffrey Canada talking about how America fails it’s black children, and how cheap it would be to fix the situation when they’re young versus spending millions to lock them up later. Truly inspirational.
Sometimes you make a mistake and just dread picking up the phone to fix things. I just did that. I messed up (by one day) the date I meant to return from France by Eurotunnel.
Naturally I’d bought the cheapest possible ticket with “no changes or refunds” allowed. How did the friendly gentleman I spoke to deal with this?
He offered to change to the same time on the correct day but unfortunately, it was going to cost an additional £6 – not a fee – just how much I’d have paid if I got the booking right. 30 seconds of credit card details later and I’m all done – no hassle, no fuss, no issue.
Eurotunnel is one of those weird travel providers, like Easyjet, who secretly give you all kinds of extra stuff – if you turn up early at the Eurotunnel terminal, you can generally just catch an earlier train – miss yours and you’re mostly just allowed to drift on to the next one. It’s wonderful and exactly what you’d expect they’re able to do.
Similarly, easyjet let you catch an earlier return flight for free – if you’re flying to London you can even pick any flight going to any of the London airports.
Great service and I end up a happy customer.
with enough storage for 2 mp3s to the Terabyte disk I just bought off Amazon. 
> being famous for crossing the Atlantic to weekends in New York to take advantage of the shopping (fair enough, the exchange rate has put paid to that but you get the idea).